Maarif-ul-Quran (En) - Al-Baqara : 96
وَ لَتَجِدَنَّهُمْ اَحْرَصَ النَّاسِ عَلٰى حَیٰوةٍ١ۛۚ وَ مِنَ الَّذِیْنَ اَشْرَكُوْا١ۛۚ یَوَدُّ اَحَدُهُمْ لَوْ یُعَمَّرُ اَلْفَ سَنَةٍ١ۚ وَ مَا هُوَ بِمُزَحْزِحِهٖ مِنَ الْعَذَابِ اَنْ یُّعَمَّرَ١ؕ وَ اللّٰهُ بَصِیْرٌۢ بِمَا یَعْمَلُوْنَ۠   ۧ
And you shall surely find them, of men, the most avid for life -- even more than the polytheists. Of them, one would love to be aged a thousand years. But it will not remove him from punishment to be so aged. And Allah is watchful of what they do.
This verse shows the basic weakness of the Jews which did not allow them to accept the challenge proposed in Verse 94, and thus exposes the hollowness of their claim to the blessings of the other world being reserved for them. The Holy Qur'an puts a special emphasis on the fact that the Jews loved physical life much more than did the Arab polytheists. Such an inclination should not have been surprising on the part of the latter, for, after all, they did not believe in the other world, and physical life was the be-all and end-all for them. But the Jews acknowledged the existence of the other world, and even had the illusion that they alone deserved its joys, and yet it was they who, above all others, wished to live in this world as long as possible. This very desire shows how baseless their pretention was, and how they themselves knew that they would have to face the fires of Hell in the other world, and that physical life was, as long as it lasted, a kind of protection against their final fate.
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